The Most Harmful Foods for Your Mental Health (Eat This Instead) | Nicole Laurent

**Jesse Chappus** (0:00)
Coming up on today's show.

**Nicole Laurent** (0:02)
Sometimes you don't realize how poorly functioning you are until you fix it. There are areas of hypometabolism that occur in mental illness. So if I've got parts of my brain that cannot use glucose for fuel well anymore, then I'm starving my brain of energy that it needs to function. There is never a time that insulin is low enough that I can make an alternative fuel known as ketones. And so I'm starving my brain. My brain can't do basic housekeeping, it's constantly under duress, it starts to down regulate higher functions. I work with a lot of wonderful researchers, and one of them said something that really surprised me. We were probably always supposed to be in ketosis most of the time in our evolutionary history. And it might be that the ketones were actually organ stabilizers. So being in ketosis might be one of the ways in which our body maintains homeostasis in our organs, including our brain. I work with a lot of people with serious mental illness, but I also want to say if you feel like your brain is meh, it's okay, it's good. It might be worth it to switch fuel sources and see how your brain feels on ketones. You might be a race car using the wrong fuel and not even know it.

**Jesse Chappus** (1:17)
Nicole, for somebody that hasn't made the connection yet between mental illness and what they're putting in their mouth, let's start out really broad and talk about why what we eat matters for our brain health.

**Nicole Laurent** (1:31)
So very, very broadly, something that people really can't quite or don't understand because they haven't really been educated about it, or it hasn't been the focus of education, is that your ability to make energy in your brain, and for your brain to have good mitochondrial health and to have all the micronutrients it needs and the amino acids it needs in order to make your neurotransmitters and fight neuroinflammation.
Food directly affects that, your choices directly affect that. And that is foundational and preventative and something that our society just has not paid attention to at all. This idea that what we eat is completely disconnected from how we are functioning, or what we are able to handle, or what our capacity is, is not reflective of how the human brain and the human body work.

**Jesse Chappus** (2:32)
Well, there's a lot of information out there, a lot of conflicting information on what to eat in general. How does somebody begin to piece together a diet to heal the brain?

**Nicole Laurent** (2:44)
The first thing that you really need to do is you need to understand the limitations of different research models.
And that might seem like a very counterintuitive place to begin, but it's actually very, very important. Because many of the things that we are told to eat, or are told that have benefit, actually come from epidemiological studies. And epidemiological studies, by their very nature, are hypothesis generating. They are not an area of scientific inquiry that is supposed to inform guidelines. They're not made for that. And part of that is because the data, the way data is accumulated for epidemiological studies are in ways such as food frequency questionnaires, where, for example, if someone asked you or I what we ate that week, we would have a heck of a time telling them what it was and exactly how much. And it would be very general. And so if you had a hot dog, we wouldn't know what brand it was or what quality of meat it was or any, things like that. And so how much broccoli did you have on your plate? And so on and so forth. So these food frequency questionnaires are flawed by definition. And then we make these very general recommendations based on that. The other thing that really, really, really must stop is picking food choices based on, I would say, ideas about what is morally a high ground. So we can talk more about that, because I think that is fascinating and very interesting.
But sometimes these epidemiological studies are used by special interest groups to promote a particular agenda that may not actually be consistent with what we understand about human biology.
And so that's another piece. So really, you have to kind of understand what your studies are based on. And I really like to make my recommendations based on what we know about human biochemistry, as opposed to epidemiological studies. Or, you know, I'm very particular about, okay, so whose agenda does this study promote? And is that based in human biochemistry? Or is that based on some kind of agenda about how they want or think the world should work?